The culinary experience
The food is not an amenity attached to the trip. On most KCT journeys it is the reason the trip works.
Not a chef agency
We are not a private-chef agency. We build and run a culinary operation inside a journey we are already producing.
That distinction changes everything downstream. The chef is chosen after we know the property, the group and the route. The menu is developed against what can actually be bought within an hour's drive. The kitchen is surveyed before it is promised, and if it cannot be made to work, we build a second one.
Kosher travel usually fails at the supply chain, not at the stove. So we treat provisioning as a logistics problem with a deadline, which is what it is.
- Team size
- 2–8 in the kitchen
- Standard
- Agreed before day one
- Also runs
- Villas, chalets, yachts
- Scoped
- Separately, on request
Available separately
Culinary and hospitality services can be scoped on their own - for a family who already has the property, or for a producer who needs the kosher operation built. It is quoted separately from destination production in every case.
The brigade
Who is actually in the kitchen.
Executive chef
Leads the menu, the standard and the kitchen. Chosen for the destination and the family, not assigned from a rota.
Sous chefs & pastry
Sized to the group and the program. A week for twenty-four with a Yom Tov in it is a different brigade from a villa week for eight.
Mashgiach
Present where the standard requires it, briefed on the family's practice, and part of the team rather than an inspector visiting it.
Service team
Front of house, butlers and stewardesses - attentive without being intrusive, which is the harder of the two.
Kitchens & provisioning
The kitchen is built, not found
Almost no beautiful property has a kitchen ready to cook for twenty under supervision. The work happens weeks before anyone arrives.
- 01Site survey of the kitchen, galley or field location before anything is committed
- 02Kashering, or a dedicated mobile kitchen where kashering is not possible
- 03Dedicated equipment, ovens, refrigeration, warming and storage brought in as required
- 04Meat, dairy and pareve separation planned into the physical layout
- 05Provisioning routes established, with local suppliers identified and vetted
- 06Kosher meat, wine, cheese and specialty goods consolidated and shipped ahead
- 07Weekly resupply runs where the property is remote
- 08Shabbat and Yom Tov systems - blechs, urns, timers, warming, plata capacity
- 09Waste, water and power planned for, particularly on yachts and remote properties
- 10A written kashrut standard agreed with the family before the first order is placed
Dining
How the days are eaten.
The family table
Most nights. One long table, courses that keep coming, and nobody looking at a menu.
Local and seasonal
What was at the market that morning, cooked properly. This is the whole point of eating in Tuscany, or the Cyclades, or Provence.
Shabbat and Yom Tov
The meals the week is actually built around. Planned first, and given the most kitchen capacity.
Children, honestly
Children eat differently and earlier. We plan for it rather than treating it as an interruption.
Aboard
Galley-scale cooking that does not taste like galley cooking. Menus built around resupply points and sea state.
Celebration service
Plated, family-style or stations, for twenty or two hundred, at the same standard as the family table.
Cooking where you are staying
The culinary operation is the same whether a family is in a Tuscan farmhouse, an alpine chalet or aboard a yacht. A brigade is assembled for the destination and the property, the kitchen is surveyed and built to carry it, and the standard agreed with the family is kept from the first order to the last meal.
Two pages go further into the detail: our kosher standards and what a private kosher chef engagement includes. For a description of how a kitchen is built inside a historic property, read building a kosher kitchen inside a fourteenth-century house in the journal.
Begin a conversation
Tell Avicam where you would like to go and who is traveling. We discuss honestly whether KCT is the right team, and how an engagement would be structured. We reply as soon as we can.